Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Top 7 reasons why Blogger+Adsense+Analytics sucks

My angry compilation of reasons that make a Blogger experience drudgery.My angry compilation of reasons that make a Blogger experience drudgery.

Blogger has only 16 templates you can choose from. That's poor. Plus, you don't really have stretched 3-column templates.

Custom templates and widgets aren't really much help either. Blogger's R&D department (if there really is one) is slow when it comes to upgrading, and when it does, it makes sure all your stuff is screwed.

If you've signed up for Adsense, brace yourself. You'll wake up on mornings where you'll discover Google ads splashed in places you never put them. If you plan to continue using Adsense, get used to it, and see a shrink if necessary. If you haven't seen your Adsense messing up your day yet, you're either blessed or need a shrink already.

Bloggers are stats-needy. Google is sympathetic and has Google Analytics. Unfortunately, it often analyzes your traffic horribly wrong. Example: right now it's telling me nobody's visited this blog in the last three days. Yeah, right.

Templates are supposed to be pure simple darn code. Not on Blogger: your widgets contort at times, and often your whole blog turns Firefox only. Now, whoever said Google isn't planning to be the next Microsoft?

You have images on your blog? Wow. I hope they all load. The ones on my blog don't, more often than not, and you get to say an ugly CSS blob. Refreshing the page doesn't help most of the time either. Categories? Meta tags? Let's not even get into that.

Adsense should be pretty normal too. Like you can filter your ads and stuff. Doesn't work: I've mailed Adsense a couple of times, and gave up on removing the kissing tutorials I have for YouTube referrals. Same thing happened for text ads, and I couldn't stop Google from promoting gay dating sites on my blog (I'm not racist or sexist or anything of the sort, btw).

Result: I've opted out of Adsense, have Sitemeter on my blog and am considering a switch to WordPress. The only thing about Blogger that keeps my nerves right is it's simple to get published. Right now I don't have any time to spend on template hacking or figuring out how Adsense can be put on a leash. When I'm better off there's a good chance I will be saying tataz to Blogger for good. I might or might not fool around with code then.

Update: I'm sticking to Blogger for the time being (plus because if I migrate to WordPress or elsewhere I'll have to edit all my posts). I'm giving Google Adsense another shot (let's see how well it performs this time around); and Sitemeter will have to do.